Tuesday, October 06, 2015

State Religion Explanatory Power (Barro and McCleary 2005)

Today, I am going to discuss in class (Econ 452: Religion, Ethics, and Economics) the Barro and McCleary (2005, Quarterly Journal of Economics) paper "Which Countries Have State Religion". The preliminary data analysis in the previous few posts is part of my illustration to the students in this class of how to come up with a term paper topic, how to look through available data to formulate a reasonable hypothesis, etc. They all write term papers for this course, and I am writing one with them, hopefully showing them by example how it's done (they also do team projects wherein they do data analysis to replicate results from earlier papers, to learn how to use R, concatenate datasets when needed, use reasonable instrumental variables, etc.).
For today, I figured that the presence of a state religion may provide explanatory power for the level of mistrust of people of other nationalities (which, as we have seen in previous posts, correlates strongly with the level of mistrust of people of other religions). Below are plots of the level of mistrust measured as the percentage of those surveyed who choose "do not trust very much" or "do not trust at all" when asked how much they trust people of other nationalities (this is the percentage for those who gave an answer; i.e. those who said that they didn't know or otherwise didn't give a response wee excluded).
The first plot is for the country having a state religion in 2000 against the level of mistrust, and the second plot is the ratio over three years (1900, 1970, and 2000) of having a state religion. The data for that are taken from the Barro and McCleary paper, Table I, which is mostly based on Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia.

What would be more interesting would be to correlate the state religion variables with the correlation between mistrust of people of other nationalities with mistrust of people of other religions (treating religion as a nationality). I should do that next, but am not sure whether or not I can get it done before going to class in an hour.